Switchback. Ch6 pt1

The old Evans place

Elizabeth’s soul emerged from the place it had spent the last twelve and a half hours, and as her small stiff form relaxed, she exhaled the breath she drew a minute earlier.

          ‘It’s worked, Helen,’ Peter said.

          Little Elizabeth blinked a number of times before she sat up; she scanned the darkened room then looked upon her parents and spoke in her usual soft, squeaky voice. ‘Who the fuck are you two?’ she said.

          Peter looked at Helen to see her eyes widen and her jaw drop, he on the other hand chose to ignore the outburst and took his daughter’s hand in his. It still felt cold. Still felt dead.

          ‘Lizzie, it’s us,’ he said.  ‘Mom and dad.’

          Elizabeth frowned. ‘Is this some kind of sick joke?’ she said.

          Helen stood and placed her hand over her mouth. ‘Oh God, what the hell have we done, Peter? This isn’t Lizzie.’

          Elizabeth looked herself up and down. ‘Fucking ‘A’ on that one, lady,’ she said.

          Helen moved to a drawer beside the bed, and when she turned back there was a gun in her hands.

           ‘What the hell are you doing, Helen?’ shouted Peter, he put himself between his wife and the bed. ‘Are you insane?’

          She pushed him aside, took aim. ‘That’s not Elizabeth, I told you it was too late, I told you we shouldn’t do it after midnight.’

          Elizabeth’s face softened. Colour returned to her cheeks. Her arms reached out. ‘Mommy, it is me,’ she said. ‘Help me, I’m scared, really scared.’

          Her eyes were blue again; her pupils normal size, although Peter noticed the left one was odd in some way, but chose to ignore it.

          Helen’s hands shook as she pulled back the hammer. ‘You are not Elizabeth,’ she insisted.

          Again Peter stepped between them. ‘For Christ’s sake, put the gun down, Helen, please.’

          Helen moved to one side, the gun still aimed. Her breathing loud, tears streamed from her eyes, a trail of clear snot ran from her nose. She sniffed at it, smeared it with the back of her hand. ‘You’re not my daughter,’ she said. ‘You are not Elizabeth.

          Elizabeth knelt on the bed, her thin arms held out toward her mother. ‘Mommy, please stop it, you’re scaring me.’

          ‘Put the gun down, Helen, you can see this is Elizabeth.’

          Helen didn’t respond; she looked confused, her gaze shared between husband and daughter. Peter placed his hand over both hers and pushed them and the gun down toward the floor.

          ‘Helen,’ he said, his voice soft, calming. ‘It’s Lizzie; she really has come back to us.’

          She stood in silence, her face wet with tears, and like a dam of pent-up tension bursting under the strain, her whole body relaxed and she relinquished her stand. She looked over her daughter’s face, dropped to her knees, allowed the gun to clatter to the floor as she raised her arms to her daughter.

          ‘Elizabeth?’ she said.

Slow, deliberate, and calculating every nuance of the situation, Elizabeth slid from the bed and stepped over to the woman she just called mommy to feel an embrace so tight it almost stopped the movement of blood in her veins. The man dropped to his knees and placed his arms around both of them. Then a loud but muffled bang sounded and the woman’s head jolted back, her eyes wide. Elizabeth looked at the man to see disbelief on his face as he watched a dark stain develop in the centre of the woman’s stomach. And then, with her little girly arms, she raised the heavy gun to eye-level and shot the man mid-chest, he fell backward against the wall beside the eastern twin.

          Again she raised the gun. ‘Like I done told you, lady,’ she said, and pulled the trigger again. ‘Fuckin’ A on that one.’ The shot blew the back of the woman’s head across the bedroom window and the bullet disappeared through the glass .

          She turned back to the man to see him attempted to rise.

          ‘Who?’ was all he managed.

          ‘Who?’ she repeated. ‘Your worst fuckin’ nightmare, Buddy, that’s who.’

          ‘Where’s Elizabeth?’

          ‘Fuck Elizabeth, seventeen fucking years I’ve been stuck in that place. I shoulda known that bitch was gonna pull a stunt like this.’ She neared her face to the one who said he was “Dad”. ‘What did she tell you, throw your dead baby girl in one end and she’ll pop out the other end like some brand knew fuckin’ toy?’

          ‘I...’

          ‘Don’t answer that; just tell me where the fuck she is.’

The closer Mitch got to the old Evans place the more his instincts told him something could be wrong. He thought back eighteen years to the night before he found Grace Evans’ son Karl outside the Leyton Falls police station all trussed-up like a thanksgiving turkey and stinking of the shit he’d soiled himself with. Mrs Winkle had complained about noise coming from the house that night, too. She said she clearly heard Karl Evans shout something about how his mother had to go ahead with it, how she had to get the right person for the switch, or he’d make sure Pa came back to get her for what she had done to him.

          Mitch was sure Mrs Winkle had been on the booze then also, because Karl’s father, Lucas Evans, disappeared three years before that night, the day after he beat-up on Grace and put his sixteen-year-old son in hospital and killed the family dog. But the morning after Lucas had supposedly done all this, Mitch called to the house to see how everyone was, he saw Anne Morris, who was a school teacher in Leyton Falls at the time. She was in the back yard burning all of Lucas’ belongings, with the not-so-dead dog sitting beside her as she did it. It was she who told him that Lucas Evans had left in a hurry that morning after Grace had threatened to bring charges against him. After that, Lucas was never seen again.

          The house had been empty for the past fifteen years, that was until the Ferris’ moved in just six months ago when Peter Ferris secured a position at Leyton Falls Elementary where he schooled children a year younger than his daughter. Anne Morris, now the school principal, had always been a dear friend of Grace Evans, and as far as Mitch knew she still visited her at the sanatorium on a regular basis.

          It wasn’t clear to him why it happened, but he saw something he thought odd at the town festival just after Elizabeth had been found. It was Anne who discovered the girl, but as Peter Ferris got to her she thrust the child’s doll at him almost hard enough to knock him over, and she looked to be scorning him in a furious barrage of words. At the time Mitch put it down to one of those “You should’ve been watching your little girl” things. But that doesn’t explain why she stuffed the doll into a cloth sack, tied it into a very tight knot, and walked away with it.

          He decided he’d have to ask her why.

Fifty yards from the house, Mitch noticed a faint blue glow coming from one of the front bedroom windows; the rest of the place was in darkness and looked as peaceful as he expected it to look on any other night, but just in case Mrs Winkle had heard the Howler boys and their motorcycle, he cut the engine and rolled the car to a silent stop outside the house and just short of the drive.

          Mitch looked toward Mrs Winkle’s to see her front-room curtains twitching. ‘I’ll check on Helen and Peter,’ he said. ‘It’s probably nothin’, anyway. You go have a chat with old Wino Winkle and I’ll be over in a couple o’ minutes.’

          ‘Are you sure you don’t need me?’

          ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘The place seems quiet enough.’